


Beyond The Shadows

by HowTheHoursGoBy



Series: Darker Demigods [1]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Anger, Arguments, Because THAT Sounds Fun!, Breaking Teenagers, Car Accidents, Child Soldiers, Distrust, Drinking, Drowning, Dying As Teenagers, Dying Before College, F/M, Funerals, Going into Shock, Government Fugitives, Guilt, Insanity, Keep This Quote In Mind, Kidnapping, Kids Of The Seven, Kill Them All, Loss, M/M, MIA Children, More Giant War Deaths, Murder, Murder-Gangs, Neck Snapping (mentioned), Not a Happy Story, Phone Calls, Reyna’s DONE With Everyone’s Crap, Smoke Inhalation (mentioned), Sorrow, Trauma, lots of death, runaways - Freeform, selective mutism, ”Being a half blood is dangerous.”
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 08:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17546351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HowTheHoursGoBy/pseuds/HowTheHoursGoBy
Summary: Doesn’t everyone wish they were a demigod? Doesn’t EVERYONE want to be a child of the Seven? The ones who triumphed when the odds were against them? The ones who survived while many didn’t?No. They should have NEVER considered it.Did they hear of what happened to the Seven? Unlucky things for sure.Did they ever hear that they fell apart? Did they ever hear of the arguments they had?Fourteen kids definitely have.And they’ve paid the price.(An Alternative Approach to the Seven’s kids, and just exactly what went wrong in their lives.)





	Beyond The Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been meaning to start up this account for a while now, but I still didn’t know where I was going with those stories.
> 
> And thus came this.
> 
> Criticism Is Always Welcome!
> 
> DISCLAIMER: No, PJO, HOO, and ToA are not mine.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

She always saw HER.

It never changed, no matter the amount of times that she’d scream or her eyes would widen or she’d run away.

She tried to convince herself otherwise. That, fuck, Zoe’s still dead and Andrew’s still as stuck up as usual.

The latter was false, but the former was true.

Nobody ever looked at her the same way anymore. She was just Priscilla Jackson, the girl with the dead sister, the dead father, a wreck of a mother, and a very, very broken younger brother.

And, in some ways, she wished that none of that, was ever true.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

She lost her father in the middle of her freshman year.

She didn’t expect such a thing, not at first. She didn’t ask for her to be called to the office, for her to find out that her Dad was merely driving across the road, when BAM! He crashed into another car.

“Drunk driver,” the police said. And Priscilla just wanted them to stop talking and kill the man who ended her father’s life. To torture him.

To make him suffer.

She didn’t know that that thought, would be the worst mistake of her life.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Her mother kept in contact with her family friend.

From what Priscilla knew, the friend’s name was Piper. Piper McLean. Apparently the woman was classified as ‘insane’ after the death of her high-school boyfriend, and apparently Priscilla’s mother just wanted to keep her together.

It wasn’t that Priscilla minded, though.

Most of her Mom’s friends died as teenagers or young-adults.

It’s just that she wanted everything to go back to normal.

She wanted it to be okay.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

And then three months later, Andrew didn’t come home one night.

It sent the whole family into a panic. One moment, he was biking over to his friend’s house. The next, he simply wasn’t.

A kidnapping. An abduction.

Hell, Priscilla didn’t care about what she was supposed to call it.

He was twelve.

When she was twelve, she had gone to sleepovers and visited aquariums with her father. When she was twelve, she dealt with hallway gossip and homework assignments. She dealt with Zoe’s bickering nature and her mother’s love of museums.

She didn’t get kidnapped.

But he did.

Dammit, why did the people who did nothing wrong were the people who had to die, the people to suffer the most?

She didn’t know.

Neither did Mom. Neither did Zoe.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The first thing Andrew did when he got home after two months was lock himself in his room.

The Jacksons (including Priscilla) never found out what happened those nights. They never found out how to help him, how to know exactly what he was dealing with.

And so he never spoke a single word again.

And, to Priscilla, she believed that it was all her fault.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

“It’s not fair!” Zoe protested. “Why am I the one that has to listen to your lectures?”

“Because, Zoe,” their mother attempted to remain under control. “You are twelve years old, and these are seventh grade lessons.”

“Yeah, but why not make the other two do them?”

Priscilla wielded a skill that Zoe could never even fathom: the ability to notice when to stop talking, or else you’ll be dealing with a very angry mother.

Priscilla just . . . Kinda blocked out of the rest of the conversation.

Which was hard when your mother was screaming like a banshee.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

It never should have happened.

It didn’t have to happen.

And yet it did.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Priscilla often contemplated that day. The one where Andrew didn’t come downstairs, the one where Zoe finally gave up and let Priscilla have the dibs on the cranberry juice. Priscilla supposed that that should have been the moment when she should have started to become suspicious.

Never, in her sixteen years of life, of her twelve years of being stuck with Zoe as her annoying little sister, had she ever gotten the juice first.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The next hour went by so slowly.

Priscilla swore she could have recalled every moment of that hour. Of those sixty minutes. Of those thirty-six hundred seconds. Of those . . .

Okay, you get the point.

She remembered when Zoe asked to go to the lake behind the house. It was spring break, so mother hadn’t really minded. And neither did Priscilla or her brother. Zoe was, strangely to say, responsible around the lake.

She was always back when she said she would. She was a pretty good swimmer, so she always followed safety precautions.

But this time, something went wrong.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

“Catch ya later, Cilla.”

The very last words Zoe ever said to her.

Priscilla cherished them, yet she also wished that it could have been different. She wanted to scowl at the way that Zoe had used that nickname, the very one that she had protested against for all these years and thought she would keep protesting.

But then Priscilla just had to find her at the bottom of the lake.

Of course she wasn’t breathing.

Of course CPR didn’t work this time.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

April 4th.

An ordinary day to most.

But, to Priscilla, she thought of it in the same way that Hazel Zhang (Or something, Priscilla couldn’t recall) thought about October 18th.

What did these two days have in common to them?

It was the day they lost a sibling.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

She wanted for the guilt to stop following her.

She wanted to make all of it go away.

She wanted to bring Dad back, as stupid as it sounded. She wanted to help Andrew. She wanted to be there for Mom, and maybe, just maybe, stopped Zoe from going to the lake that day.

She wanted for everything to be the same again.

But it wouldn’t.

And it never would be.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter Two: BROKEN


End file.
